Mobile Content Marketing Guide (New Ebook)

Mobile matters more than ever. If you’re not taking a mobile-first approach to content marketing, you’re limiting your reach and ignoring a significant portion of your audience. But what goes into a mobile content marketing strategy, and how can you make it work for you? This guide will introduce you to the concept of mobile content marketing and help you make it work for your brand.

What Is a Mobile Content Marketing?

A mobile content marketing strategy puts the emphasis on creating content — whether it’s blog posts, images, or video — that is optimized for a mobile device. Mobile content marketing doesn’t ignore desktop users. It simply recognizes that more and more people are likely to be conducting searches and interacting with content on smartphones and tablets than they are on traditional desktop or laptop computers.

Why Mobile Content Marketing Matters

Why should you care about mobile? In short, because it’s everywhere. Over the past few years, people have steadily been making the switch over from desktop devices to mobile devices.

Ownership and use of smartphones more than doubled between 2011 and 2017, according to a survey from Pew Research Center. In 2011, Pew’s survey found that just 35 percent of people in the US owned a smartphone. By 2016, that number had increased to 77 percent.

While smartphones seem to rule the mobile landscape, they aren’t the only tool out there. Pew’s survey revealed that more than half of people also own tablets.

Rise of Mobile-Only

Perhaps more importantly for content marketers, an increasing number of people are mobile-only, meaning they own a smartphone but don’t have another internet connection at home. At the end of 2016, 12 percent of adults in the US only used their mobile devices to go online.

Although that 12 percent might not seem like a lot, it marks an important shift in how people go online. In March 2015, comScore revealed that the number of mobile-only internet users had surpassed the number of desktop-only users for the first time.

By March of 2015, 11.3 percent of people were mobile-only, compared to 10.6 percent who were desktop-only. Interestingly enough, the number of desktop-only users had plummeted over the course of just one year. In March 2014, nearly 20 percent of adults in the US were desktop-only users, compared to 10.8 percent who were mobile-only.

The end of 2016 brought with it another important milestone in the mobile vs. desktop debate. Statscounter Global Stats revealed that in October 2016, more people were going online with mobile devices than desktop devices.

More than 51 percent of internet usage was on a mobile device that month, compared to just over 48 percent of internet usage on a desktop device. The previous year, around 45 percent of internet usage was mobile and 55 percent was on a desktop.

Mobile Leads To Action

Having a mobile content marketing strategy isn’t only important because more people are likely to be using a mobile device. Google revealed it will use mobile friendliness when determining how websites rank in search results.

Additionally, a 2013 survey from Nielsen and Think With Google found that people conducting searches on mobile devices were likely to take some action as a result of the search. It found 75 percent of people who conduct a mobile search follow up in some way. About a third continued to do research. A quarter visited a store’s website. And 18 percent shared the information they had found.

People using mobile devices also quickly follow up on what they find. The survey found that more than half of all conversions from mobile search happened within an hour. About 84 percent of follow-ups occur within five hours of a mobile search.